The Digital Video Broadcasting System version 2 (DVB-S2) standard describes a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) providing a continuous forward link for a full-duplex terminal wherein the receiver is always in the receive mode. The continuous forward link uses Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) that provides for frames of varying length. The demodulator relies on successful reception of a frame's Physical Layer Signaling (PLS) header to determine the length of the current frame and sets up the aperture window to look for the next frame's header. As the continuous forward link uses a receiver that is always receiving, a half-duplex terminal is not supported without loss of capacity and/or packet loss.